Fight organizations (manager)
Fight organizations are the most complex companies to run but are also the most satisfying. Before setting up an organisation, make sure you’re willing to spend some time building it and looking after it – you will have a lot of fighters under contract and they will rely on you to help build their careers through frequent and appropriate matchmaking. New organizations will have a low hype rating, just like newly created fighters. This hype is built by putting on good shows and by promoting quality fighters and as with most things, the more money you have, the quicker you can move this process along. Importantly though, even at this low hype level, your organization can make a profit by holding events. Put on a sensible show with a good amount of advertising, prudent fighter pay and appropriate production values, and you’ll come out with a better bank balance than you started with. Let’s not get too carried away thinking about booking an event just yet though – we don’t have any fighters signed and nobody is going to show up to stare at an empty cage! Signing fighters It’s reasonable to assume that as a new fight org, you’re not going to be able to sign any of the game’s top stars so in your early days, you should look to sign newly created fighters on low wages. Let’s assume that’s going to be your tactic for the purposes of this guide. When a manager creates a new fighter he will (hopefully), tick a box saying that his fighter is looking for a contract. You can search for a list of such fighters by going to the “Search” page and filling in the appropriate details. Try searching for fighters with hype between 30 (the starting value) and 100. This will bring up a list of fighters who have just a few fights and who are therefore going to be cheap to employ. You could even look for slightly below 30 and you might find some good guys who are 0-1. Write down the fighter IDs of the fighters you’d like to sign, then make your way to the contract offers page. You can do this by clicking on your org name in the main menu, then going to the quick link menu and selecting “Contracts”. IMPORTANT - make sure you sign fighters who are in the location where you plan to hold events. If you're holding events in London, sign fighters that are based in London. You can sign fighters from other locations if you want to but make sure their managers get their fighters to travel to the right location come fight time and make sure the fighter has enough money to do so. * Retired fighters. If a fighter retires without fighting any fights on his contract, when you release him you will get your signing bonus back. Filling out contract proposals Input the fighter ID and click “Look up”. The fighter’s name and weight will pop up, so you can make sure you’re signing the right guy. Weight: Pick an appropriate weight class. Note that fighters can bulk up or drop down in weight but not excessively. If you ask someone to cut too much weight they may not make the cut and the fight might not take place. Much like in real life, cutting weight or putting on weight will affect the fighter’s speed, strength and general effectiveness. Visit the weight cutting page for more info. Fights: Choose the number of fights you want the contract to be for. If you’re signing debuting fighters you may want to keep this to a low number – whilst you will be signing some potential stars, you’ll also be getting an equal amount of donkeys. Finances: Again, if you’re signing debuting fighters, keep this as low as you can. The price will likely depend on how many other organisations there are in your area – the more competitors, the more you will have to pay. As a guide, keep fighter pay for new fighters in to around $150-200 and you will be fine. Once you have had your first event, you can re-assess your contract spending. Expiry date: This is a real world date and is the point at which the contract will automatically expire. Inactivity clause: This is a very important value and also the most complex. From an organisational point of view, you want this to be as long as possible but the opposite applies for fighters. If this clause is activated, the fighter will be able to leave the contract. This does not mean they HAVE to leave the contract, it just means they can. From the moment the fighter signs the contract, this clause will start ticking down until you offer them a fight. Then once the fighter signs up to a fight, the figure starts counting down again, so make sure the fight isn’t too far into the future. Let’s take a look at an example. If we make the inactivity clause 30 days, you need to offer the fighter a fight within 30 days of signing the contract. The fight itself should then be less than 30 days after they agree to the fight. If the fighter is on a multi-fight contract, the clause will start ticking down again, straight after their first fight. The only time when the clause stops ticking down is when a fighter is injured. In this circumstance, the countdown is paused until they return to full health. Exclusive?: All contracts within MMA Tycoon are exclusive, so the fighter cannot sign to another organization whilst they are signed to you. This may change in the future depending on user input. Note: When setting your expiry date and inactivity clause, don’t forget that the MMA Tycoon world progresses at 3 times the speed of the real world. 30 days in the real world is equivalent to 3 months in MMA Tycoon land. So, now you’ve decided on the settings for your contract, click send and the fighter’s manager will receive a message detailing the contract offer. If they accept, the fighter will be added to your roster and displayed both on the contracts page and also on your fighters list. If they have ticked the “need fight” box, they will also appear at the bottom of the organisation homepage. Once you’ve signed at least 10 fighters, you’re ready to book an event. Booking an event From your organisational homepage, click “create new event” in the quick links menu. The first thing to note is that you don’t need to fill out all of this information in one go. A new event can be built up over a period of time – just make sure that you click “save” at the bottom of the page if you wish to come back to it at a later date. Name, date and location are all logical. The arena: Once you have picked a city for your event, this drop down box will display a list of available arenas on that date. If all arenas are booked on that day, no arenas will show up in the drop down box and you should change your event date. VERY IMPORTANT - once you select a date and click save, that's it - the date is set for the event. If it then turns out that you can't book an arena you will have to cancel your event and that may result in a big hit to your organization's hype rating. Picking the right arena is also very important. You will have to pay an arena fee of $10 per seat for your event so you need to pick one that is suitable for your predicted attendance. Running an event in an arena which is too big could bankrupt your company before you've even started and you certainly don't want that! As a rough guide. A new company with a card full of new fighters may attract about 500 people, with low ticket pricing. Note that as in real life, you'll get a better attendance if you hold an event at the weekend, rather than in the middle of the week. Number of fights: You are allowed any number of fights up to 10. The more fights you have, the more tickets you will sell so if you can put together 10 fights, you should. If you hold an event with very few fights it will go down terribly and will seriously harm your organisation's hype and finances. Ticket prices: There are 5 ticket prices you can pick from. Budget, low, medium, high and premium, which have an average ticket price of $37.50, $50, $75, $100 and $150 respectively. The ticket prices will affect attendances in a linear fashion. I.e. when you double the price of tickets, half as many people will show up. The point of this? Well, the more people show up to your event, the bigger boost you will get to your organisations hype, whilst if you have a smaller predicted attendance, you can fit into a smaller arena and therefore have lower overheads. Advertising spend: This figure is probably the most important value of all, when booking an event. If you don’t advertise at all, virtually nobody will show up because they won’t even know your event is going on. At first, for every $ spent on advertising, you will get a dramatic increase in people showing up to your event, until you reach a certain point. After that point you will get decreasing returns, whereby for every dollar spent, you will get progressively less and less benefit. For your first event, if you have 10 fights, this point will be around $9,000. You can spend less if you want to, especially if you've played it safe with your first show (as you should) by booking the Micro Arena. For more information on this, visit the following page - event advertising. Production values: This figure is basically how much money you spend on lighting, pyrotechnics, ramps etc. It will not mean any extra sales for this event but if your production values are impressive, your customers will be happier with the show and your organisation will become more popular in the long term. Free tickets: Sometimes known as “papering” an event. Basically you can give away as many free tickets as you like. Papering makes it appear that your organisations is more popular than it actually is, giving you a [hype boost. These guests will also spend some of their money on merchandise and refreshments too, so they do provide a small amount of income. However, these papered guests will take a seat which could have been sold to the public so be careful to balance papering against predicted ticket sales. Event poster: This is just an optional image upload, for a bit of fun. If you want to create an event poster you can but it won’t make any difference to attendances or PPV sales. Pay per view Deciding whether to have a pay per view will get tricky later on but it’s an easy decision when you’re starting out – don’t have a PPV! There simply isn’t enough demand to support lower quality fighters, so you would end up losing a lot of money… so much in fact that you’ll probably bankrupt your company and end up losing it before you've event started! In order to generate enough interest to hold a 1 hour PPV, you’ll need an organisational hype of around 250 and fighters of a similar quality. PPV length: A PPV can be 1, 2 or 3 hours. The longer the PPV, the better your event will need to be, to support the extra overheads. For every hour of the PPV, you have to pay a fee of $300,000 to the television company. You will also have to pay them 50% of all PPV revenue. NOT needed unless you're doing a PPV. Commentators: You can hire different qualities of commentator for your event. The better the commentary, the more enjoyable the viewing experience, which in turn will mean more people will buy your next PPV. NOT needed unless you're doing a PPV. Number of cameras: Much like commentary, the more cameras you have at the event, the more professional your broadcast will look and the more people will purchase your next PPV. NOT needed unless you're doing a PPV. Cut off time Note that you cannot edit the numbers right up until show time. When it reaches the day of your event GMT time, the event will be locked off, so make sure you complete all your settings before this cut off time. Booking fights Of course, the most important part of the event is booking good, competitive fights! Note that the fans in MMA Tycoon are a discerning bunch who appreciate nice, even matchmaking, so the less mismatches you have on your card, the better the attendance will be and the better the rating it will receive from the critics. The following section will enable you to pick your 10 (or less) fights. First select a weight class, the number or rounds and the number of minutes per round. The screen will then automatically display all your signed fighters in that weight class. Pick a matchup that you like the look of and then click “send” to send a fight proposal to the manager of the two fighters. At this stage, you can also select if you want the fight to be a title fight. Of course, if you have a champion in that weight class, the fight must include that fighter, for you to make it a title fight! Once you have sent out all the fight proposals, you will have to wait to hear back from the respective managers, to see if they agree to the bout. This will be displayed in the next two columns. If both fighters agree to a fight, the fight is locked and cannot be changed. If one of the fighters rejects the bout or does not reply, you can select a replacement simply by picking a new fighter from the drop down menu and clicking send. Publish: You can publish an event at any time, which will make it visible to all users. It is unwise to publish an event without booking an arena, as you may alert a competitor who may decide to book the arena to sabotage your event. Booking an arena will automatically publish your event. Important notes *Always save the event if you have made any changes. If the event is drawing near and a manager hasn’t replied, send them a personal message. If they still don’t reply, you’d probably better find another opponent. Managers of both fighters will need to agree to the new bout. If a fight is not confirmed by both managers, it will not take place. *Watch out for injuries and cuts! It will let you book a fight for an injured fighter. He will still fight but will not perform well. In terms of cuts, if someone has a 20+ day cut, the fight will be ruled a no contest before it even starts. If they have a cut less than 20 days then the fight will go ahead but may be stopped due to TKO cuts if the cut gets any worse. *The bout will run from bottom to top in relation to your selection boxes, so the main event is the top box. Put your most popular/hyped fighter at the top of the bill to get the best event rating. Co-main events are also valued more than other bouts on the card when working out the attendance/event rating etc. X fighter isn't appearing There are a number of reasons that a fighter may not appear. * They may already have a fight booked within your organization. You may only book one fight at a time, because the fighter could get injured in the first fight and therefore not be able to make the second fight. * They may have a Quick Fight booked. If that is the case you just have to wait for that fight to take place before you can book another fight for them. * They may be waiting for a QFC fight. If this is the case you have to wait for them to get this fight out of the way first. Check a fighers "next fight" status on their profile page to confirm if either of these two situations applies. * If your event happens after their contract runs out, they won't show up. During an event All events take place at 6pm local time and in the 3 hours or so following this time, you will be able to watch the event play by play live (COMING SOON). Visit the event page at any time during the event and the commentary will appear automatically. Once the event is completed, this page will default to a “post event” analysis of the event. Post event Once an event has taken place, you will be dying to know how much money you made (or lost)! On your organisation homepage, your event will appear in the list of recent events (the third section down on the right). Clicking this link will provide a number of stats for the event, including attendances, financial details and a list of the fights. Within this page you will also be able to set DVD sales. If your event was recorded as part of a PPV, you can also sell the event on DVD. The better the event rating and also the more recent the event, the more DVDs you will sell. Through time, DVD sales will generally decrease, but an increase in your organisation’s hype can result in improved sales. Summary So now you’ve had your first event and assessed it’s successfulness, it’s time to repeat the process but do a better job than you did the first time! Good luck with your quest for global domination and don’t forget to discuss your thoughts in the forums! Diminishing returns This is very important so requires it's own little section. Note that you must not hold too many events in a short period of time, as each show will do progressively lower attendances. This is known as diminishing returns. Visit the diminishing returns page for more detailed info. Inactivity If you run a fight org and become inactive, this is obviously unfair on all the people who sign fighters with your org. So, if you don't sign in for 14 days and don't book any events for your fight org for a similar period of time, all fighters within your org will have their inactivity clause set to 1 day, enabling them to leave your company. This does not affect your company's hype - it just frees them up to leave if they wish to do so.